[8] Odo Marquard, on the other hand, described the “Ritter School” as part of the Enlightenment project, which, however, was less close to Descartes, Turgot, Fichte, Marx, Lukács, Sartre or Habermas than to Montaigne, Locke, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Weber or Lübbe.
This can confidently be described as a historical achievement.” The historian and publicist of the new right, Karlheinz Weißmann, emphasizes in a review of Hacke's work in Junge Freiheit that Willms, Maurer and Rohrmoser, for example, were more critical of liberalism.
Willms, for example, has indeed undergone a transformation here: initially “still a very faithful student of the Ritter school, which was actually so civic-minded”, he later becomes “a rather steep right-wing bird himself, who, via Hobbes and Fichte, moved more and more towards the nation”.
Due to relevant publications on the Nazi era, Ritter himself is credited with involvement in “philosophical enterprises conforming to National Socialism” and an “elegant opportunism” that “aims to Germanize the origins of European modernity”.
He moves into Nazi institutions to the extent that their mistrust accompanies him and 'tests of endurance' are demanded of him.”[12] Ritter had prominently defended a political and cultural-philosophical conservatism in critical approval of “modernity” - a program that Rohrmoser, for example, resolutely took up.
The original methodology of this work has been commented on divergently, for example as a “continuation of the - theory-abstinent, systematic philosophy and thus in particular all transcendental thinking rejecting - intellectual and conceptual-historical approach, of which Rothacker was the protagonist”.
[20] Reinhold Aschenberg believes that Rothacker (the founder of the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte), Gadamer and Ritter formed a “dominant triumvirate” that “from the second half of the 1940s onwards, was able to continue the suppression of all systematic and critical thinking sponsored by National Socialism without interruption and to replace it with the somehow ‘historical’ orientation” that “was to become so characteristic of the philosophy of the Federal Republic until the 1970s.“[21] In international discourse, the Historischen Wörterbuchs is generally recognized today as a definitive standard work of philosophical and conceptual historical research.